Page:Swedenborg, Harbinger of the New Age of the Christian Church.djvu/97

 On the 15th of July, 1724, a Royal warrant was issued by King Frederick appointing the well-born Assessor Emanuel Swedenborg a regular Assessor in the Royal College, with a salary of eight hundred dalers in silver. This was not the full salary of the office, which was twelve hundred dalers, but was increased to it six years later. Of the following ten years employed in public duties we have no details, but know from his later publications that together with his official duties Swedenborg was diligently pursuing the course of study he had adopted. Early in the year 1733 he asked from the King leave of absence for nine months, in which to go to Germany and see through the press his great work entitled as a whole, Opera Philosophica et Mineralia. Of this there were three noble folio volumes, printed at the expense of his friend the Duke of Brunswick. The first volume had the special title of Principia Rerum Naturalium, or First Principles of Natural Things; the other two treated of the working of iron and copper. Of the Principia its English translator, the Reverend Augustus Clissold, says—